Terrible traffic is just a fact of life for most people who live in the Toronto area, but Hamid Akbari’s gruelling commute inspired him to do something about it.

Akbari, now 38, was commuting from downtown Toronto to the University of Ontario Institute of Technology in Oshawa, where he was hired as a professor in 2013. Akbari got the job after immigrating to Canada from Iran to complete his PhD in strategic management at York University.

“Commuting is not fun. It’s boring doing a lot of driving,” Akbari said. “I was looking around at other vehicles, most single-passenger, seeing the same faces and looks like they were bored too.”

To address gridlock and conserve resources, public officials have been trying for decades to find ways to get people to carpool to work instead of commuting alone. However, co-ordinating a carpool is tricky: Finding people travelling the same route at the same time as you is challenging, picking up strangers can make people nervous and figuring out how to split the cost can be awkward.

Akbari realized a mobile app could solve all those problems, by matching drivers with passengers and making the cost-sharing automatic. And as it happened, his brother and sister-in-law were interested in helping him start a tech business.

There was just one complication: Akbari’s brother and sister-in-law live in Maracaibo, Venezuela. Vahid Akbari had been recruited by a state-run oil and gas company, but with economic conditions deteriorating in Venezuela, he was looking for a change.

Azam Mohabbatian, Akbari’s sister-in-law and the company’s chief technology officer, said the situation presented an opportunity to help ease traffic woes in two cities at once.

“Venezuela has kind of the same problems (as Toronto),” she said. “All of the country is growing fast and manufacturing is producing some problems such as traffic.”

Together they launched BlancRide, a carpooling app with a Venezuelan technology team, a Toronto head office and Iranian founders. Akbari said the app has about 20,000 users in Maracaibo and 12,000 in Toronto, with plans to expand to more cities in North America and Latin America by the end of this summer.

Peter J. Thompson/National Post

Sunil Sharma, a managing partner with Extreme Venture Partners, said BlancRide’s international roots and family ties are what convinced him to invest in the company.

“I don’t think, without that component, this story could have even happened,” he said. “There’s that confidence of family and technology background that just made this, in my view, investable.”

Akbari had started a business in Iran, but found it wasn’t an easy place to be an entrepreneur. He said he chose Canada for its stability, diversity and robust intellectual property laws.

To start a business, Akbari took a $50,000 bank loan, raised $250,000 from family and close friends, and went on to raise an additional $1 million from a group of investors that included Extreme Venture Partners. BlancRide launched as a pilot available only to UOIT students in the fall of 2014, with 10 per cent of the student body signing up within two-and-a-half months.

The additional high occupancy vehicle lanes that opened on Toronto-area highways during last summer’s Pan Am Games were the perfect opportunity for BlancRide to launch city-wide, offering frustrated commuters a way to cut down on the worse-than-usual gridlock by helping them find enough passengers to drive in them without getting a ticket. BlancRide launched in Maracaibo in November.

Venezuela has kind of the same problems (as Toronto)

The app prompts commuters to input the time of day they commute, whether they’re offering or looking for a ride and where they’re going. Users whose commutes match up can then message each other, confirm the details and negotiate the fee.

BlancRide avoids the regulatory headaches that have beset ride-sharing app Uber by making it available only to people who want to recover some of the costs of a trip they would make anyway, not those who want to profit by offering rides.

Competition is not a concern, yet. European carpooling app BlaBlaCar is worth US$1.5 billion and a handful of apps such as Scoop and Ride have tried to break into the U.S. market, but the phenomenon has yet to catch on in a big way in North America.

Akbari said he hopes to see five per cent of the population carpooling by 2020, which could translate to $500 million in revenue a year for BlancRide. For now, the company is offering the app for free to grow its user base, but it plans to charge a 20 per cent commission once it expands beyond Toronto and Maracaibo.

Operating on two continents has both advantages and challenges. BlancRide benefits from a devalued Venezuelan currency, a university in Maracaibo that provides a good pool of talent and the fact the difference in time zones is only 30 minutes. On the other hand, the company has to navigate two vastly different regulatory regimes, financial systems that aren’t fully integrated and must hire bilingual staff.

Sharma said he’s interested in working with more startups that are operating in Canada and a developing country.

“There’s a real fit between taking the stability of a country like Canada, where we have the highest quality of life, and combining it with entrepreneurs and people who are coming from very challenging conditions,” he said. “Their personal abilities, I believe, are very strong, because they’re surviving.”

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